Quotes About Probability

pilot might think a 1-percent chance of being shot down on a given mission acceptable, then realize that fifty such missions made it a 40-percent chance.

The world is a very strange place,and the dice are always rolling

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

GULL (musing) : The law of probability, it has been oddly asserted, is something to do with the proposition that if six monkeys (he has surprised himself) ... if six monkeys were .. . ROS: Game? GULL: Were they? ROS: Are you? GULL (understanding): Game. (Flips a coin.) The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their

La casualidad es la única dueña y señora del universo, ya lo dijo Einstein

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

Without naïveté, father and son would have been defeated; had they aimed lower, according to the logic of probability, they would have failed.

Yet there seemed to be some truth in the law of probability, according to which the chance of success is directly proportionate to the number of repetitions.

Levi always said if you heard hoofbeats, expect to see horses, not zebras.

In the realm of very small quantities prediction becomes uncertain, if not impossible, because very small quantities no longer behave in accordance with the known natural laws.

In 1877 he published his paper "Probabilistic foundations of heat theory", in which he formulated what Einstein later called the Boltzmann principle; the interpretation of the concept of entropy as a mathematically well-defined measure of what one can call the "disorder" of atoms, which had already appeared in his work of 1872, is here extended and becomes a general statement.

Rather than probability, one can speak of a measure of the disorder of the atoms, because the equivalent disordered states (for a given macroscopic state) are very many and the probability that one of them occurs is extremely high. We shall discuss this paper in detail in Chapter 6.

At first he did not realize what he had accomplished; he thought that he had remained within the boundaries of mechanics, that he was computing actual numbers of molecules, without realizing how much probability was involved.

In the same paper Boltzmann was able to derive a proof of the irreversibility of macroscopic phenomena. It is the difference of scale between the objects that we observe in everyday life on the one hand, and molecules on the other hand, which explains this irreversibility through the laws of probability.

There is no mechanical impossibility, it is merely the fact that there are so many more possible positions of the various powder grains that will give a grey appearance, as compared to the much smaller number of configurations in which the grains are well ordered.

The Second law of human stupidity: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.

Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.

Probability does not refer to the evolution of matter in itself. It relates to the evolution of those specific quantities we interact with.

And there is the fact that what matters is not how things are, but rather how they interact. Spin networks are not entities; they describe the effect of space upon things. Just as an electron is in no place-is diffused in a cloud of probability in all places-space is not actually forned by a single specific spin network, but rather by a cloud of probabilities over the whole range of all possible spin networks.

Quantum uncertainty across the horizon of the black hole generates fluctuations of the horizon geometry. But "fluctuations" imply "probability," and probability implies thermodynamics, and therefore temperature. Concealing from us a part of the universe, a black hole makes its quantum fluctuations detectable in the form of heat.

The probability of finding an electron or any other particle at one point or another can be imagined as a diffuse cloud, denser where the probability of seeing the particle is stronger. Sometimes it is useful to visualize this cloud as if it were a real thing. For instance, the cloud that represents an electron around its nucleus indicates where it is more likely that the electron appears if we look at it. If you have encountered them at school, these are the atomic orbitals.

Some behavior is more probable, other behavior more improbable.

I may not know something with certainty, but I can still assign a lesser or greater degree of probability to something.